


Where the Green Grass Grows

by bestworstcase (windrattlestheblinds)



Series: The Ones Who Bloom in the Bitter Snow [4]
Category: Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure (Cartoon), Tangled (2010)
Genre: Bitter Snow, Gen, Missing Scenes, Saporian!Caine, Saporian!Cass, TTS Gen Week 2021 (Disney), The Dark Kingdom (Disney: Tangled), Worldbuilding, oneshots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-18 23:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29616933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windrattlestheblinds/pseuds/bestworstcase
Summary: Quiet moments and assorted Bitter Snow flotsam, written for TTS Gen Week.Day 1 ❦ Baking cookies to celebrate the capture of a wanted thief is all well and good, but someone still needs to do the dishes, after. [Cassandra & Lance]Day 2 ❦ Dione lifts her hands in supplication. She wonders what the beast thinks of this; if it thinks. If it has ever been more than the empty wrath festering inside her, torn free and made manifest. Monstrosity becomes her, and it. [Zhan Tiri]Day 3 ❦ Aphelion, the Dark Kingdom, is a nation shrouded in legends. This is one of them.  [In-Universe Folktale]Day 4 ❦ “You… killed the Great Tree,” Sorchā says slowly. [Zhan Tiri]Day 5 ❦ She’d known her father was dead. Of course she had. [Lady Caine]
Relationships: Cassandra & Lance Strongbow, Zhan Tiri & Her Disciples
Series: The Ones Who Bloom in the Bitter Snow [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1721755
Comments: 18
Kudos: 32





	1. Celebrants

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Baking cookies to celebrate the capture of a wanted thief is all well and good, but someone still needs to do the dishes, after.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 1: Celebration / Sunset / Mirror
> 
> A little missing scene from Chapter 9 of [_Benighted_](archiveofourown.org/works/23888713). Context, for the uninitiated: Rather than coming to Corona to run a heist, Lance is a thief-taker who arrived in pursuit of a thief, and Cass helped him run said thief into a corner to recover the stolen goods.

Once the cookies are in the oven, Cassandra gathers the chaos of mixing bowls and flour-dusted spoons left strewn about by Rapunzel’s zest for celebration and lugs it all into the scullery. A request for help teeters on her tongue, but she swallows it; baking not being her forte, she hadn’t done more than stir as directed. It seems only fair that she handle the clean-up.

Besides, she hadn’t been a scullery maid for _nothing._

But that thought tastes bitter, and Cassandra tells it to shut up. The evening’s excitement gave her plenty to celebrate and nothing to sulk about. No sense ruining that by wallowing in the stale grudges of her teenaged years.

Shaking her head, she heaps everything into the sink, lights the lamps, and goes to draw water from the scullery cistern. She’s lugging a full bucket back to the sink when the familiar squeak of the scullery door breaks the silence, and she looks up, startled, to find Strongbow ambling inside.

“Need a hand?” he asks.

“Uh. Well—”

With a grin, he slings his satchel down to prop open the door, allowing in a steady wash of heat from the kitchen; then strides to the sink and rolls up his sleeves. “I’ll wash, you dry?”

“…Sure?”

Bemused, Cassandra heaves the bucket over to him, and they spend a few quiet minutes rinsing dishes and heating water and filling the sink. Lance arms himself with soap and a sponge, and Cassandra snatches the drying rag from its hook and stands beside him in radiant confusion.

“You alright?”

“You’re, uh, not what I would’ve expected from an ‘old friend’ of Fitzherbert’s,” Cassandra says bluntly.

He snorts. “Yeah, well. It’s been a few years. How’s the eye?”

“Eh. I’ve had worse.”

“Don’t meet a lot of ladies-in-waiting who’d say _that_ about taking the blunt end of a crossbow to the face. …Come to that, don’t meet a lot of ladies-in-waiting.”

“Yeah, well. Never been much good about being a ‘lady.’”

“Right, right.” The water slops as he begins to scour out the largest bowl with well-practice vigor, humming. “Mind if I ask you something?”

“…Go for it.”

“Well,” Strongbow says, drawing the word out in a careful sort of way, “you handled yourself pretty well out there.”

“Nnnnot a question, but I’ll take it.”

Chuckling wryly, he mutters, “Yeah, yeah. What I mean is—you ever think about doing it for real? No offense, but, ah… you seem more comfy with a sword than with—” He pauses. “—whatever ladies-in-waiting… wait on.”

“Rambunctious princesses,” Cassandra says, dry.

“That.”

She releases a long rattling sigh. “You… could say that. I’m—if I had my way I’d be on the Watch already, but… _Dads,_ right?”

“I wouldn’t know,” he says lightly. “Orphan and all.”

“ _Right._ ” That’ll teach her to tune out everything Fitzherbert says. She winces. “Stars, I’m sorry—”

“Eh.”

“I’m actually—” He passes the bowl over to her, and Cassandra hastens to rinse the suds away, flushed with embarrassment. “I’m an—I mean, my real parents are dead. They weren’t, um, good people.”

“You’re adopted?”

“Dad—yeah.” Jittery, she wipes the bowl down and sets it aside, glad for the excuse to turn away for a moment. “He’s a good man, you know? He took me in, showed me how to defend myself, how to take on responsibility, earn my keep… Saved me from– from who I might’ve become, otherwise.”

“Must’ve been nice,” Strongbow says, sounding wistful. “Don’t think I had a single good role model until about— _mir brelce,_ five or six years back, now.”

“Yeah?”

“Basil D’Ambrosio,” he says. “He’s the magistrate down in Chilon who put me onto this whole thief-taking business in the first place. Good guy. Big believer in second chances, which is how come I’m not rotting in prison right now.”

“Right,” Cassandra says pensively. “So this started off as an atonement thing.”

“It was this or jail, yeah. Took about a year to work off my sentence, but by then…” Strongbow passes her another dish, grinning. “Probably don’t need to tell _you_ doing right by people feels better than stealing, huh?”

“Congratulations on your new conscience.”

He tosses his head back and guffaws. “Thanks.”

“So… Chilon,” she says. “Will you be headed back there?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe. Like I told you before, I’ve been thinking of getting into less… dangerous employment, and, eh… Thief-taking’s got a way of making criminals hate you, funnily enough.”

“Imagine that.”

“So—might set up here, actually,” he continues. “Nice and quiet, no enemies. Job board looked busy when I was scoping out the harbor. Inn’s nice enough to do until I can find more permanent lodgings. Pretty ideal, all in all.”

Strongbow gives her a sidelong glance, and Cassandra realizes with a stir of surprise that he’s waiting for her _opinion,_ as if that matters in even some small way to his decision of whether to stay or go. She blinks, and says the first thing that pops into her head.

“Talk to Monty Debenham. He’ll get you set up with a good job faster than pulling notices off the job board will—he’s a good guy. Runs the sweets shop on Osiander Street. Tell him Cass sent you.”

“Monty Debenham,” he echoes, looking pleased. “Osiander Street. I’ll do that.” Grinning, he hands over a whisk and adds, “I’m touched.”

“ _Hmph._ Well. Don’t read too much into it, Strongbow.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

She cracks a smile, and they settle into a comfortable rhythm as they work their way through the last of the dishes. Cassandra can hear Rapunzel and Fitzherbert murmuring to each other from the kitchen, sounding all… _gooey_ in a way that makes her glad she can’t pick out more than a word here and there. Whatever lingering awkwardness there’s been since Fitzherbert’s _stupid_ proposal two nights ago seems to have been ironed out by the Strongbow’s arrival and—she’s happy about that, for Rapunzel’s sake, really. Even if it means Fitzherbert will probably be back to hovering around making a nuisance of himself tomorrow.

Or maybe not, if his old friend sticks around after all.

“You know,” Cassandra says, “not to get all soggy on you, but—I think it’s pretty impressive that you turned your life around like you did. I know it’s… not something a lot of people manage.”

“Yeah, it’s…” He sighs gustily, passing the last dish over to her, and rocks back on his heels as he wipes the suds off his hands. “A hard climb. Don’t think I could’ve done it at all if Basil hadn’t helped me out. But thank you. I appreciate that. Now—” He grins again. “—how about we get back in there to chaperone the lovebirds before they burn _our_ celebratory cookies?”

Cassandra grins, too. “Sounds like a plan.”


	2. This Dark Thing That Sleeps in Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dione lifts her hands in supplication. She wonders what the beast thinks of this; if it thinks. If it has ever been more than the empty wrath festering inside her, torn free and made manifest. Monstrosity becomes her, and it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 2: Nature / Laughter / Shine
> 
> May I interest you in some Zhan Tiri lore on this fine Monday evening?

When Dione walks into the caverns beneath the tree for the second time, she does not come armed. Thick roots clot along the earthen walls and palpitate in time with the hideous reverberations of a starveling pulse; the great cosmic heartbeat that has inhabited her since she first braved this cosmic abyss. Darkness worms in the gaps, fraying into tangles of mycelium and bulbous sacks breathing out black galaxies of spores. The shadows part for her like shrouds and fold close around her shoulders, welcoming.

_Surrender._

It is a strange thing. Unfamiliar, the shape of it worn smooth as river-stones by the cascade of years with the beast ever snapping at her heels. Now, she fits herself around it with ease— _surrender,_ in the empty spaces of herself.

(she is home.)

Dione had not understood the dark when she last ventured under the ground, but now—hollowed, hallowed and vacant, she kneels between the jagged teeth of stalagmites felt more than seen and drinks the stale decaying scent of the hungry shadows.

“Bel’it,” she whispers. “Gat As’la. I– I’ve come.”

“So you have.” Brackish, the voice trickles from the edges of the darkness in a thousand spider-spun tendrils, and, shuddering, Dione lifts her hands in supplication. She wonders what the beast thinks of this; if it thinks. If it has ever been more than the empty wrath festering inside her, torn free and made manifest. Monstrosity becomes her, and it.

Thorns tickle her lips.

“…Defenseless,” the beast adds. She has never heard it sound like anything but stagnant water, but it deepens now. Triumph ripples the still dark surface of it. “Why?”

When had it begun to ask questions? Dione remembers the first time it spoke; its guttural snarls had peeled away from the night and from beneath came a hiss—insidious, a slippery thing stitched into the fabric of her own mind.

— _you will bleed, you will_ rot _—_

_—you will die screaming while the flesh is picked from your bones—_

She had been afraid, then.

Fear has fled from her since. Dione wets her lips, and the sharp tang of her own blood fills her mouth. “I want—a covenant,” she says. “Bleed my enemies and I will serve you to the end of my days. Feast upon me, inhabit me, infest me as you will. Only– only slaughter them first.”

“Vengeance,” the darkness drawls.

“Yes,” she says in a bare whisper. “Please.”

It lays a claw delicately against her cheek. “What need have I for a servant? Everything hungers. All things die. It is the nature of things—” the claw slips down, nearly gentle “—to decay.”

“You have not killed me yet.”

“…No,” it says pensively. “Not yet.”

Dione tilts her head, baring her throat to talon and thorn, and studies the formless amalgam of the shadows above her. The shape of the beast, limned in a black radiance darker than the lightless cavern—a hooked beak, and serrations of feathers, and a spiraled crown of horns, and the vast pit of a vacant eye—tenebrous.

It presses her down, into the soft, squirming muck of the cavern floor, and she goes limp; the last vestige of her defiance eroded away and forgotten. She traces the long curve of the talon at her throat, and waits.

“I want,” the beast murmurs, “a name. I have been called so many things. Bel’it. Gat As’la. Munavir, Iamh'otlath… one thousand words for cruelty and destruction. _Hunger._ ”

“Those _are_ names,” Dione says.

A shrill hiss scrapes through the darkness. “I do not— _like_ them. They are not– they do not—” Its head swings sideways, the great beak snapping with a sound like thunder, and little clods of earth rain down. “What have you _done_ to me?”

“…You take.” Dione runs her hand along the talon again, mired in tranquil fascination as the darkness seethes in its agitation, and releases a shaky breath. “I have nothing left but you.”

She reaches up, and the beast crooks low to fit its piceous beak into her palm. Half-decayed detrius flakes away beneath her fingertips as she caresses the barbed tip, the jagged underside of its upper mandible.

“Tell me your name,” she says, “and let me teach it to the world. I will carve it into the bodies of my tormenters and scatter it like seeds to the wind until it germinates in every corner of the earth; you will be _known._ ”

“A blossoming,” it hums. “Ẓanti’ri. That is— _mine._ The teeth of the storm, and the dying scream of thunder amidst the violence of rain; the wrathful sky.”

“…Ẓanti’ri.”

“My name,” the darkness says, with midnight slowness, “is Ẓanti’ri, and—I am not an an _it._ I am– I am like you. Dione.” The talon pinning her to the cavern floor hooks deeper, piercing, and Dione gasps as a rancid heat seeps into her flesh and something splits, slips, sloughs away—crumbling into darkness, broken apart by a hundred, a thousand crawling black filaments that burrow tenderly into the cracks and take root. The shadows ripple with quiet laughter, and Ẓanti’ri purrs, “You are _mine,_ my dear, and we will do such _vicious_ things together.”


	3. The Sword of Queen Elabran

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aphelion, the Dark Kingdom, is a nation shrouded in legends. This is one of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 3: Protection / Rain / Triumph
> 
> The Dark Kingdom can have a folktale, as a treat.

There came a time when the Children of the Shining Falcon could not live any longer in the cold, fallow north of their birth. They were ruled by stalwart Queen Elabran, then, and she looked upon the gaunt, wan faces of her people and bade them prepare for a long march. Then she laid down upon the ice and went to sleep beneath the hollow eye of the silver moon.

Now, the Falcon’s Children were well-accustomed to struggle, for none can live in the frigid north otherwise, and some did not wish to abandon their homes. “We have weathered storms before!” they cried, while their kinsmen gathered their belongings and readied their sledge-hounds for the journey to come. “The skies have darkened before, and always the sun rises again. The ice may be harsh, but it provides. It is madness to leave—madness, and cowardice.”

“Stubbornness is not strength,” others replied. “We have known cold before, but not like this. We have known long nights, but never for so long.”

Still others said, “Is it cowardice to search for kinder lands? Are you so fearful of the unknown and unseen that you would rather stay and die on the ice you have always known?”

So fierce grew the disagreement that brother turned against brother, and daughters lifted their arms against their mothers; meanwhile Queen Elabran slept on undisturbed and still as the ice itself, so still that the Falcon’s Children counted her among the dead.

But Queen Elabran was not dead, but dreaming. The great Lord Turul, who shakes the waters and roosts in the moon, came down from the sky to visit her as she slept, and stalwart Elabran cried out to him, “Oh, Lord Thunder, Singer-Crowned-With-Stone, hear me! The Kind Fire has forsaken us, leaving us to the mercy of darkness and ice, and we are starving and afraid. But though you nightly change your shape, you are also steadfast. Will you lead us out of this endless winter?”

“What will you give me in turn?” asked Turul.

“Our voices,” Queen Elabran said without hesitation. “We will learn the music of the moon and the stars and the darkness and sing them in the night; and we will gather our songs of the earth and the ice and the seas and share them with you.”

“What else?” asked Turul.

“Our loyalty,” Queen Elabran said. “We will carve temples and raise shrines in your honor. We will tell our children of your kindness, and teach their children of our gratitude. We will love the moon and forsake the sun, and no longer will we fear to go in the dark.”

“And what else?” asked Turul.

Steeling herself, Queen Elabran answered, “Lord Turul, I will give you my eyes. You are the Watcher, the Warden, the Crescent-Eye; take my sight, and we will follow you wherever the moonlight leads.”

Pleased, Turul clapped his shining wings together. A mighty wind howled over the ice, and dark clouds muffled the chorus of the stars, and thunder tore across the sky. The Falcon’s Children dropped their weapons and cried out in fear, all disagreements forgotten, but sleeping Queen Elabran did not stir, and in her dreams, she stood tall and proud as ever.

Lord Turul said, “For your songs, I will speak to you. For your hearts, I will shelter you. And for your sight, I will lead you. Awaken now, and the covenant is made.”

Then the dreams of Queen Elabran fell away. A brilliant lance of moonlight came screaming down from the sky as she awoke and struck her eyes. In an instant they changed: one to iron, lightless and black; the other into an opal blue as a midnight glacier and shining like the stars. When Queen Elabran sat up, both fell from their sockets and left her blind.

In the terrible roar of thunder that followed, Turul cried, “Bring your eyes to the cold-fires of the northern sky and forge a blade beneath a hollow moon. Quench it in starlight and set the opal into its pommel; carry it with you, south and east, to the cauldron of the world. When you reach the sea, lift the sword above your head and plunge it into the earth, never draw it forth again. Build your new nation there; be peaceful, and trust in my protection. I will keep you there, and you will prosper.”

Awe and terror filled the hearts of the Falcon’s Children when the last echoes faded, and all listened in hushed silence as Queen Elabran told her people of the bargain she had made. Some could not bring themselves to accept it, and she did not reproach them; for the only fealty sought by Lord Turul is that which is freely chosen. They would stay in the frozen north, and wait for the release of death or the return of the capricious sun.

Most, however, met Queen Elabran’s tale with gladness. They readied their sledges and rode north, to the crown of the world where the cold-fires burn, where Queen Elabran cast her iron eye into the blazing sky and forged it into a sword as Lord Turul had instructed.

The moment she placed the opal into its setting of iron, a shining beacon of moonlight flared on the distant southern horizon, and though Queen Elabran could not see, she heard her people’s weary cheers and cries of hope and new Lord Turul would keep his promises. She slung the new sword from her hip and bade them follow the moon.

The Children of the Falcon obeyed, and though the journey was arduous and long, though they endured countless tribulations, though they carried their whole lives on their backs, never did their trust waver, and never did they stop until they reached the southern sea.

There, so it is said, Queen Elabran drove her sword into the pale cliffs beneath the beacon, the opal began to sing; and, singing, grew the great city of Umbrae itself from the earth. The Falcon’s Children settled there, and named their new kingdom Aphelion: mighty and strange, shrouded and nourished by the mysteries of the night.


	4. Choimghē

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You… killed the Great Tree,” Sorchā says slowly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 4: Exploration / Trust / Flower
> 
> Local demon discovers pain and also, feelings.

“What have you done to yourself?”

Zhan Tiri makes a pitiful mewling sound and, quivering, does not answer. Deep gashes rupture the languid undulations of the peatland, gouging almost down to the bedrock, and she huddles in the depth of the wound: a pile of branches and bone pressing up beneath pulpy grey flesh and wet fur, half-drowned in bog-water.

Bemused, Sorchā lays her staff aside and begins a scrambling, crabwise descent along the sheered rim of the hollow. Cold mud squelches under her hands. Halfway down, the sodden peat disintegrates and plunges her, yelping, into the liquid muck at the bottom.

Frigid shock crashes over her. She sputters, chokes—coughs on a mouthful of silt—and then, gasping, wobbles to her feet. The murky water slops around her thighs.

“…Zhan Tiri?”

Another moan.

Soaked to the bone, teeth chattering, Sorchā splashes closer. Always, before, the revenant has seemed somehow insubstantial; a creature of woven smoke and shadow. Sometimes sunlight lanced through the clouding, oily black to trace impressions of a curving horn, a serrated fang, elegant fingers tipped in barbed talons—sharpened claws of cruelty, Sorchā had thought once, sheathed in abyssal paws.

Stripped of that tenebrous pall and laid bare to the bitter dawn, Zhan Tiri is… small. Little bigger than Sorchā herself; her body a strangle of black roots and pale white bones, heaped and strung together by strange contortions of sinew. A gangrenous pelt stretches over her macilent frame, thinning here and there to expose pallid flesh mottled by lurid bruises. Bulbous wooden knots form the suggestions of hunched shoulders breaking through the flesh; she lies curled with sinuous, trembling arms wrapped around her head. A charcoaled horn carves into the air, dripping with moss.

Zhan Tiri moans again.

Shivering, Sorchā sloshes closer—close enough to run her hand over the waterlogged and peeling bark of her shoulders. It feels odd to touch her, like a stumble in the peculiar dance of maybe-friendship and maybe-faith they have danced together in the handful of years since their first encounter; but Zhan Tiri lurches into her palms with a feeble rasp and settles, slowly, under her fingertips.

“It– it hurts,” Zhan Tiri whimpers. “Sorchā—”

“Shh, shh.” She fits herself into the cavernous notches of Zhan Tiri’s spine. Feverish warmth simmers under the foul pelt—the suppurating heat of infection—a balm against the numbing chill of the water. “You left to visit to Ri Ni’n,” she says, gently stroking the damp fur at the nape of Zhan Tiri’s neck. “Did she help you?”

“N-no.” Keening, Zhan Tiri curls tighter around herself. “She refused—she… I killed her. I… became.”

Sorchā stills. Pain and triumph bleed together in those words, and Zhan Tiri whines again, a violent tremor wracking her shoulders. “You… killed the Great Tree,” Sorchā says slowly.

“Yes.”

“The… cosmic bridge between the sublime and the profane.”

“…Yes.”

“Why?”

“I am hungry,” Zhan Tiri says, sounding strangled. “You– you were right. But it– i-it—Sorchā, it _hurts_ —”

She stirs, then, clasping Sorchā’s wrists with reed fingers, briar-claws snagging in the fabric of her sleeves, and Sorchā begins to have an inkling, then; as Zhan Tiri writhes onto her back in the lifeblood of the peatland and presses her chitinous snout into Sorchā’s hands. Her head is a great skeletal carapace gorged with creeper, wormy with shadow; stuffed into the open pit of an eye are the smashed and rotting carcasses of figs, swarming with tiny crimson mites.

“You… took her place,” Sorchā murmurs. She strokes the elongated curve of Zhan Tiri’s jaw, the hard lines of her mandibles, the thorny arches beneath her eyes.

“Pain.” It is a breath, less than a breath, faint as the marching steps of the mites upon her fingertips. “Th-this is—this… I have… done this.” Zhan Tiri lapses into twitching, fretful silence. “Sorchā.”

“Yes?”

“I’m… afraid,” she says, halting and laced with uncertainty. “All this… suffering. It circles around; a cycle, jagged and corrupt. Nothing– nothing is _erased._ Even—when the skies fall and the seas rise, when all the world is rendered down, cracked and drained like a bone and ground into smoke; one last tainted breath—when there is n- _nothing_ left—”

“…Zhan Tiri—”

“I am so _lonely,_ ” she wails.

Her anguished cries feathers into damp air, and Sorchā, not knowing what else to do, smooths her hands over Zhan Tiri’s snout again. Zhan Tiri has spoken before of aimless dissatisfactions; of a prickling and unnamable hunger; of a lack that found its reflections in the itching tumult of her own gnawing restlessness. She had understood Zhan Tiri’s interest, with dull resignation, as a latching-on to the echoes of her domain. Revenants do not _feel._

Sorchā cared for her anyway, far more than she cared for the dull coterie of tamer spirits who haunt the shrines of Charcāthēn; she had even, childish though it was, imagined they shared some kinship, some… gossamer thread of— _something_ fundamental.

Something sticks in her throat, briar-like, sharp but not unpleasant. She combs her fingers through the bramble knotted around the base of Zhan Tiri’s horns, crooning low and soft and wordless, and murmurs, “Then stay with me.”


	5. Bitter Sprigs of Truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’d known her father was dead. Of course she had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 5: Letter / Warmth / Breath
> 
> 🙃

_Deceased - died at sea._

Four words.

Faded ink, on parchment gone brittle with age. Moira traces a line under the note with her thumbnail, jaw tight.

She’d known her father was dead. Of course she had. Torin Caine hadn’t stolen more than a few mouthfuls of food, and even in Corona a crime like that didn’t warrant more than a few years behind bars, so if he hadn’t come back in _sixteen,_ that meant—

But it’s one thing to know, and another to _know,_ with tangible details burning under her fingertips. Her father died on a prison barge in the Lost Sea when Moira was maybe nine or ten years old; and she’s raided enough of them to know he was probably starving and sick from rotting in the collective filth of a hundred other inmates. That if he was lucky they’d wrapped him up in sailcloth before tossing his corpse overboard like garbage. That even if he’d survived his sentence he would’ve returned a broken man ravaged by the years of malnutrition and frostbite and cruelty.

She would’ve been thirteen.

Moira drops the file and slumps, pressing her hands over her face. Some part of her had always— _hoped_. Every time they raided another prison barge she’d catch herself scanning the throngs of inmates they led out of the brig for the thick chestnut-brown curls she remembers him having. It had been a shriveled, painful little thing, that contortion of hope and the crumbling despair that always followed it. She had known, but she’d never been able to bury the little girl who’d practiced her penmanship by writing letter after letter for her father to read _when he came home,_ because he would come home, because he _had_ to.

_He’s not coming back._

Bitterness crawls up her throat and contorts her mouth into a vicious sneer. She shoves back her chair and lunges up to prowl around the great cabin, breathing hard. The current of smug triumph she’s been riding for the last three days is gone, hardened into a deep vein of icy satisfaction that at least, at last, Corona is going to _pay._ She’d finished copying the maps of Corona’s _precious labyrinth_ last night, and now they’re sitting in a neat bundle at the bottom of her wardrobe, ready to be handed off to the Separatists and transformed from the kingdom’s best-kept secret into the critical weakness that will bring Corona to its knees.

It isn’t enough. It can’t be enough. She could slit Frederic’s throat herself and watch him and every last one of his advisors bleed out in the pristine gutters of the capital city and it would never, ever be enough to repay what has been taken from her and from every other Saporian whose life was eviscerated by the brutality of the Coronan regime.

She just wants her father back.

But she can’t have that, so she’ll settle for watching Corona burn.


End file.
